It may seem all fine and dandy to read up on things you want to try. Hell, delving deep into the knowledge-base of whatever field you want to explore can be incredibly insightful and teach you a lot of new ideas and methods. As useful as that knowledge may be though, it only gets you so far. Eventually, you’re going to need to put it into practice. And it can be quite a rough experience if it’s your first time!

I experienced this first-hand just today. Been reading up on C++ (a programming language) recently, and figured, hey, I’ve read almost half a book on it, let’s try some shit out! I hadn’t written a single line of C++ code before. Guess what happened? I spent ten minutes getting frustrated over how hard it seemed to add a number at the end of a piece of text. Yeah, that’s some pretty basic stuff right there.

That could’ve been prevented if I had just followed along with the book and the exercises it offered. But no, I put up my attitude, “I can handle all this information without putting it into practice”. And it cost me. I probably won’t bother to go back and do it over, so I’ll struggle for the first few days of actually using it. Maybe part of that is inherent to the “complexity” of the language, but eh, I didn’t make it easy for myself either.